Pico Residents, Businesses Strike Harmonious Note On Preferential Parking

By Jorge Casuso

Maybe it was the room full of guitars and stringed instruments that helped the warring factions strike up a more harmonious note.

Whatever it was, Thursday night's meeting in the back room of McCabe's Guitar Shop had more than 70 Pico area residents and businesses willing, at least for now, to give peace a chance.

The two sides, which only two months ago had engaged in a raucous debate over preferential parking, seemed willing to work out solutions to a problem that has torn dozens of other Santa Monica neighborhoods apart.

The solutions -- proposed by the business owners, who recently banded together -- include pairing over-parked and under-utilized lots, increasing enforcement, undertaking a more detailed analysis of the problem and holding monthly meetings. Residents - some of whom have vowed to go forward with their petition for a new preferential zone -- also will sit in when the business group meets.

"We have parking problems all over the city," City Councilman Richard Bloom told the crowd, "but this is the first time where I have seen businesses and residents attempting to take a pro-active approach to solve these problems. There's a world of opportunity here, and I encourage you to stay on that path."

"This is a model of what needs to be done on a regional basis within Santa Monica," said Dan Ehrler, the executive vice president of the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce, who recently proposed a moratorium on preferential parking citywide.

The Pico business owners asked residents to postpone for six months a proposal for a preferential parking zone on Urban Avenue, a crescent-shaped street between Pico Blvd. and the freeway near the city's eastern border. The proposal is scheduled to go before the City Council on Nov. 23. Other streets along the busy corridor also have filed petitions.

"The business community would prefer you don't have preferential parking," said the group's chair Jim Stebinger, who works for Trader Joe's and writes for Surfsantamonica.com, two businesses on Pico. "We think that it's a very serious measure that could drive some of the smaller businesses under."

"We're trying to seek a permanent solution," said Tom Burney, vice-chair of the business group. "If you die, we die. We don't want to be handcuffed to a corpse. We're in on this together."

But some residents weren't buying into the proposal and vowed to move forward with the preferential parking.

"I'm cynical about the fact you want six more months," said Feran Isom, the Urban Ave. resident who organized the street's successful petition drive. "You were not sympathetic or aware of us until this issue came to a head.

"We've been through this process before," said Isom, who turned down an offer to sit on the business group's board. "This is like deja vu all over again. Why can't I have a residential neighborhood that feels like a residential neighborhood and not like a parking lot?"

But other neighbors were willing to give businesses a six-month chance to prove themselves, saying the problem had improved after some auto repair shops stopped parking their customers' vehicles on residential streets.

"To shut off parking arbitrarily seems to be an extreme position for us to take," said Paul Collins, who has lived on Urban Ave. for 40 years. "The city has placed neighborhoods in a position to establish public policy because they are cowardly."

Until now, preferential parking has been the city's main solution to one of the Santa Monica's most pressing problems. Tired of having to walk blocks to reach your doorstep? Get your neighbors to sign a petition, and the city will put preferential parking on your street.

But with some 50 preferential parking zones in place, the problem is not going away - it is simply moving down the block, fueling yet another petition drive.

"Preferential parking does not provide one piece of extra parking," said a resident of Kansas Ave., which is just one block away from the proposed Urban Ave. zone. "It just moves the problem from one person's doorstep to another's."

The city's solution also has bred bad blood between neighbors, pitting residents and businesses in an escalating war with no end in sight.

But Pico - a diverse and often neglected community whose boulevard is getting a $7.4 million facelift -- seems to be taking a different path. By the end of Thursday's meeting catered by the new Trader Joe's, residents were talking about how lucky they were to be able to get a haircut, have their brakes fixed and eat a good meal all just a few steps from home.

"I think this is a potential for a win-win situation for all of us," said one new Urban Ave. resident. "We have to be prepared to let this bad blood go. We have a chance to do something that's truly remarkable and have one of the most unique neighborhoods in all of Los Angeles."

"I think you've got a real village happening here," said Gwen Pentecost, the city's senior administrative analyst for economic development.